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Vizag Steel workers protest steel minister statement on privatisation
Hyderabad Hundreds of workers of Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited (RINL), the corporate entity of Visakhapatnam Steel Plant, on Thursday staged a demonstration and took out a bike rally in the port city in protest against the Centre’s decision to privatise the steel plant
Hyderabad
Hundreds of workers of Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited (RINL), the corporate entity of Visakhapatnam Steel Plant, on Thursday staged a demonstration and took out a bike rally in the port city in protest against the Centre’s decision to privatise the steel plant.
The workers burnt an effigy of Union minister for steel Ram Chandra Prasad Singh who said in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday that the Centre would go ahead with the privatisation of the Visakhapatnam Steel Plant to bring it out of the red.
“We have also given a call for a complete shutdown of Visakhapatnam city on March 28 and a tool-down strike on March 29. Over 30,000 permanent and contract workers and employees of the steel plant would strike work,” Visakha Ukku Parirakshana Samithi (Committee to protect Visakha Steel) leader D Adinarayana Rao said.
Singh, in his reply to the question raised by YSRC MPs Margani Bharat and TDP MPs K Rammohan Naidu and Kesineni Nani in the Lok Sabha, said the government had taken a policy decision to privatise the Visakhapatnam Steel Plant after making a thorough assessment of its financial position and functioning.
He said the steel plant has run into losses and hence, it was proposed to private it. He said the productivity of the steel plant was also very low and the problem would not be solved even if it was allotted captive mines.
Stating that the 2019-20 economic survey also indicated that the privatisation had resulted in turnaround of several PSUs, the Union minister said the Vizag steel plant would make a similar turnaround if it is handed over to the private parties.
Steel plant union leader Ayodhya Ramu told HT that the Union minister’s statement was far from reality. “Despite Covid-19 pandemic and lack of sufficient resources, the Visakhapatnam Steel Plant made a huge turnover of iron sales in 2021-22. It is expected to touch ₹28,000 crore turnover and the Centre is likely to earn ₹5,000 crore in the form of GST,” he said.
In 2020-21, too, the VSP, which has a production capacity of 7.3 million tonnes, recorded an impressive sales turnover of around ₹18,000 crore, he said.
“The government is planning to privatise the steel plant on the pretext that it has accumulated losses of around ₹22,000 crore. This loss is nothing before the total asset value of the company, which stands at ₹3 lakh crore,” Ramu said.
“It is like calling a dog mad in order to kill it. In fact, the so-called losses include the capital investment of the company on coal and other inputs. If the steel plant continues to put up the same performance, we can wipe out the losses within the next two or three years,” he said.
The steel plant unions have also threatened to block the visit of the asset valuer, who will be appointed soon for conducting due diligence study of the company, which is a prerequisite before formally putting it up for sale to private parties as part of strategic disinvestment.
“The Centre has called for bids for the selection of the asset valuer and the last date for receiving the bids is April 3. The selection is likely to be made on April 5. The selected valuer would visit the steel plant to make an assessment of the company’s value, but we shall not allow him to do so,” the union leader said.
